Benjamin Rozonoyer, the author of The Beaver Pond, offers new translations of two poems by the great Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam. More of Rozonoyer’s translations of Mandelstam, with an excellent introduction, can be read here.
Stalin Epigram (1933) We subsist, without sensing beneath us the state, Our exchanges inaudible ten feet away, If we ever scrape up a half-banter, We’ll allude to the Kremlin highlander. His fat fingers are pinguid like corpulent worms, And his words like to pood-weighing dumbbells are firm, His cockroach’s mustachios titter, And the calves of his leather boots glitter. There surrounds him a canaille of captains, neck thin, He toys with obsequiousness of half-men, Some are whistling, some meowing, some sobbing, He alone does the braying and prodding. Like a horseshoe he smithies decrees by-the-bye — To the groin, or the skull, or the brow, or the eye. Executions — as berries refreshing, And broad chest of a thickset Ossetian.
Throw a smile, o wrathful yeanling, from the wall of Raphael — Painted there, the cosmos’ pealing, yet the world is not itself: In the airy pipe’s commotion let the pain of pearls dissolve, Into azure, azure ocean’s bluest hue has eaten salt. Hue of atmospheric violence and viscosity of crypt, Folds of a tempestuous silence freely on the lap are spilt. Bluff than hardened loaf more stale — supple saplings on its height, And in heaven’s corners sails an extraordinary might.
1933
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